What is creative thinking?

Creative thinking is the thinking behind creativity: a person’s cognitive capacity to produce something new.

It comes out of the interaction between semantic content of a symbolic domain and certain mental procedures, though it does not happen when it is held back by lack of knowledge of the field, inexperience or low motivation. Creative thinking is triggered through perception, through the knowledge each individual holds in memory; it is a complementary play between the perceived act, the alternation between analysis and synthesis, associative thinking and thinking by analogy [Tschimmel, 2011].

Several psychologists and creativity researchers have studied creative thinking. Gardner [1998] argues that consciously re-examining one’s own experiences becomes a habit that increases creative capacity: individuals able to relive life experiences will be able to turn that re-examination to creative work. Novelty is born only from what already exists, and in comparison with what came before. The result of a creative process is only original when it exceeds the expectations and the knowledge of the user or observer.

According to Bonsiepe, Adams, De Bono, Michalko and others [1986, 1994, 2000], perception is the most important element of creative thinking, because it has to do with the way we see, hear, feel and smell the environment around us, and with the way our world is structured. Perception is the organisation and interpretation of the stimuli and information gathered by the senses. It is not a passive recording of internal and external stimuli: it is an extremely active process of construction [Roth, 1992]. Experiences, expectations, emotions and physical states take part in it too, working alongside the sense organs, because it is through perception that we form our concepts and our interpretations of the reality we know. The brain is a system that understands only its own language and works only from its own experience. In that task, the brain operates from the individual’s life experience. What lies at the root of creative thinking and of forming ideas is what we are able to perceive differently, different in the multiplicity of perspectives and in the combination of social, cultural or environmental contexts.

Creative thinking is also divergent thinking. It is flexible by nature, because it is used to produce several valid solutions to one problem. It is motivating too, because it immediately sets off a diversity of ideas, images, feelings and reactions. Convergent thinking, by contrast, is characterised by the rational application of logical rules and learned norms, and generally leads to conventional solutions. Both are needed during the creative process: first to generate a large quantity of ideas, then to select among them.

It can in fact be made more productive, more imaginative and more stimulating, through various techniques and activities that encourage and help the search for alternatives at the moment of generating ideas. So creative thinking should be:

• Fluid: thinking in quantity rather than quality switches off the critical thinking that blocks the flow of ideas;
• Flexible: thinking should be divergent and take shape across different semantic categories;
• Original: it makes unexpected connections through stimuli it encounters, consciously or unconsciously.

These ways of thinking (noticing curious elements, systematic analysis and synthesis, associations, unusual combinations and the transposition of analogies), strengthen and increase the likelihood of finding new ideas while solving a problem.

There are other mental procedures whose application is necessary whenever a designer creates something new: analysis, synthetic thinking, intuition, hypothetical thinking and analogical thinking.

If this topic interests you, I recommend:

• Moreira, J. (2016). O objecto como impulsionador do Pensamento criativo. Porto: ESAD, Matosinhos. Master’s thesis
• Tschimmel, K. (2011). Processos Criativos. A emergência de ideias na perspectiva sistémica da criatividade. Matosinhos: Ed. ESAD.
• Adams, James L. (1986). Guía y juegos para superar bloqueos mentales, 2nd ed. Barcelona: Editorial Gedisa.
• Bono, Edward de. (1994). De Bono’s Thinking Course. London: BBC Books.